“The word "Blue" does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.”

Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

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John Ruskin133

English writer and art critic 1819–1900

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“Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

““And is adventure and sensation all we should seek, Meliadus?”
“Aye—why not? All is chaos, there is no meaning to existence, there is only one advantage to living one’s life and that is to discover all the sensations the human mind and body is capable of feeling.””

Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff

Source: Book 2, Chapter 1 “Whispering in Secret Rooms” (pp. 428-429), The Runestaff (1969)

“Socialism is offered as a remedy. It is pretty to look at, but it does not mean liberty. It means just the other thing, because it brings us face to face with the same old equation. We know what the socialist leaders would do, for human nature does not change.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

From "George H. Earle, Jr., Doctor to Ailing Corporations". Munsey's Magazine (February 1910:683-691)

“I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency…”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“The Common Sense, is that which judges of things offered to it by the other senses. The ancient speculators have concluded that that part of man which constitutes his judgment is caused by a central organ to which the other five senses refer everything by means of impressibility; and to this centre they have given the name Common Sense. And they say that this Sense is situated in the centre of the head between Sensation and Memory. And this name of Common Sense is given to it solely because it is the common judge of all the other five senses i. e. Seeing, Hearing, Touch, Taste and Smell. This Common Sense is acted upon by means of Sensation which is placed as a medium between it and the senses. Sensation is acted upon by means of the images of things presented to it by the external instruments, that is to say the senses which are the medium between external things and Sensation. In the same way the senses are acted upon by objects. Surrounding things transmit their images to the senses and the senses transfer them to the Sensation. Sensation sends them to the Common Sense, and by it they are stamped upon the memory and are there more or less retained according to the importance or force of the impression.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology

“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other vist the human race.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter VII, paragraph 20, lines 2-4

“Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Internationale Situationist (no. 1, Paris, June 1958).

“What power was this—chance, will you say? But chance, what else can it mean
Than the hidden Cause of things by human reason unseen?”

Lewis Morris (poet) (1833–1907) Welsh poet in the English language

"Evensong", line 25, in Songs of Two Worlds: Third series (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875), p. 23.

“Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". … The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

Source: 20th century, The Analysis of Sensations (1902), p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 454

“This observation might be repeated with regard to all objects of the outer world which enter into relation with us. Whether the knowledge of them be of the common-place or of a scientific order matters little. Sensation is its limit, and all objects are known to us by the sensations they produce in us, and are known to us solely in this manner. A landscape is nothing but a cluster of sensations. The outward form of a body is simply sensation; and the innermost and most delicate material structure, the last visible elements of a cell, for example, are all, in so far as we observe them with the microscope, nothing but sensation.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 13-14

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